Discovering your strengths when you’re a teen isn’t always easy, but it can be quite the adventure. Join these two authors as they depict these defining moments of youth.
Location: Sunroom, UBC Robson Square
Type: Children, Ages 8-12, Grades 3-6
Sponsored by Y.P. Heung Foundation, Chris Spencer Foundation
Moderator: K.A. Wiggins
Readers: Susin Nielsen, Tremendous Things (Penguin Random House) | Sari Cooper, The Horse of the River: A Camp Canyon Falls Adventure (Harbour Publishing)
About The Moderator
K.A. Wiggins (Kaie) writes award-winning speculative fiction that explores the tangled webs of society, environment, and identity through intricate, dreamlike tales of monsters and magic. Best known for gothic-dystopian YA Fantasy series Threads of Dreams, a genre-bending saga of a haunted girl reclaiming her voice and her power in a post-climate-apocalypse Vancouver overrun by monsters, her work also appears in Fantasy Magazine, The Fairytale Magazine, Frozen Wavelets, and from Hungry Shadow Press, Renaissance Press, and The NoSleep Podcast. An enthusiastic speaker and educator, she currently teaches with the Creative Writing for Children Society and serves as president of the Children's Writers & Illustrators of British Columbia Society and as a director-at-large of Word Vancouver Festival of Readers & Writers. Find her at kawiggins.com or @kaiespace on social.
About The Readers
SUSIN NIELSEN is the award-winning author of "Word Nerd", "Dear George Clooney: Please Marry My Mom", "The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen", "We Are All Made of Molecules", "Optimists Die First", "No Fixed Address" and "Tremendous Things". She got her start writing for the original hit TV series "Degrassi Junior High" and has written for over 20 Canadian TV series. Her books have won critical acclaim and multiple awards both at home and around the world, including the Governor General’s Literary Award, and they’ve been translated into many languages. She’s been described as “the John Green of Canada,” and had a dream once that John Green was described as “the Susin Nielsen of the U.S.” She lives in Vancouver with her family and two naughty cats, and has most recently been show-running a popular new TV show she created, called "Family Law."
Sari Cooper is a family physician and writer living in Victoria, BC. She was inspired to write The Horse of the River after a horseback riding and rafting trip in New Zealand in 2013. This trip included some harrowing experiences outside the raft, in and under the surface of the water. No spoilers, but it may have inspired a scene or two in the book. She also drew on her own experiences like riding horses as a child, and later, working as a camp doctor. When Sari is not looking after her patients or working to strengthen the provincial primary care system, she enjoys spending time with family and friends and her cats.
